Today, the Web Ecology Project has blown every single one of those “research” reports out of the water. “The Iranian Election on Twitter: The First Eighteen Days” is a scientific look at two million plus messages produced by Twitter users.

One thing that would have been interesting would be to see messages per location and how that information spread, but the users of Twitter were poisoning that well of information by changing their locations to and/or from Iran in a futile attempt to stop the Iranian government from finding them. All this did was potentially spread misinformation about what was actually going on.

Regardless, click the image to read hard facts about the Iranian election and Twitter.

Last Friday I was interviewed on the Disqus blog by Giannii as one of the co-hosts of Create Consume Delete, and I think the interview went pretty well. You can read about how I got started on the internet, Create Consume Delete, what I feel is the most important thing and my thoughts on Disqus and comments at the full interview.

Featured Friday: Rob from CreateConsumeDelete.com

The longer version is that this is something that I’ve been curious about since it was first released. How much is someone willing to pay to put their message into my twitter stream? I suppose I’m going to find out. I’ll be documenting my side of the process as I go. Signing up was the usual information you’d give to a social network with the addition of my mailing address. I used TweetStats to figure out how many twitters a day I have on average. The answer is around 32. For that reason I chose to put one advertisement in every 20 twitters. Next I got a flood of emails from Magpie asking for approval of certain tweets that would end up in my Twitter stream. I’ll be pre-approving all of the messages that go out so I know that I’m not advertising some dick cream or stupid bullshit like that.

One option you have is to insert something before or after the ad. I would have selected #advertisement” but they don’t allow you that many characters. Instead I opted for “#ad-space” to be 100% clear about what’s going on. I felt that “#magpie” was too vague for those people who are not sure about Twitter in the first place.

That’s where I am now. I’ll let you know what the backlash will be, because I know that there will be a backlash.

I have rules about my social networks because I think of their analog equivalents.

Facebook is my address book. There are people in there that I never call, but I have their numbers and contact information just in case. People I went to school with, people I met socially and some of my family. I don’t put my mother or father in my address book because I know their numbers by heart. I used to live in that house. Facebook lets me keep current with the people I don’t speak to every day.

LinkedIn in my Rolodex. I don’t talk about my dogs on LinkedIn, I don’t talk about going to Otto’s Shrunken Head and drinking 4 or 5 of the drinks with the glowsticks, little umbrellas and plastic monkeys on them, and I don’t want the people who I’m connected to on LinkedIn to know about that stuff. I want them to know that I was the technical director of the Women Respond to Palin webcast. I want them to know that I’m looking for work as an audio producer, audio engineer or project manager. I don’t need my former boss seeing the videos I post to 12Seconds.tv or to see my Daily Mugshot. I have a different kind of relationship with them.

MySpace is my VCR. I still have it. I wouldn’t know how to get rid of it, so it sits in the closet with all of the tapes (friends) that I had when I boxed it up. I’m not going to get new tapes, but it doesn’t hurt to keep the ones I have. Besides, no one wants them at this point anyway. Even my Grandma has moved on from having a VCR.

Do you treat your networks differently?

We at Podango believe that you, our customers, are our most valuable asset. Given this belief, we have always done our best to be honest and forthright in our dealings with you. The current uncertainties of the financial market has affected many of us in this nation. As of this morning, Podango is no longer immune to it’s effects. Our ability to continue operations past the end of this year (2008) is in question. We do not want any of you, or any of your shows to be negatively affected by this uncertainty and so we are encouraging you to begin taking all necessary steps to secure your data or begin moving to another hosting provider. On Monday we will have a more definitive direction. As of today, the last day to move or secure your data is December 31st. RSS feeds will need to be redirected by this date as well. It is our hope that the events of the next few days will allow us to continue providing you a service based upon a subscription fee. Again, we will know more on Monday and you will be notified of any changes to the above plan as soon as we are made aware of them.
…
Again I personally apologize for this notice of caution. We truly appreciate your business.

Sounds familiar to me.

This morning I write to you about the future of The New York Sun, which is in circumstances that may require us to cease publication at the end of September unless we succeed in our efforts to find additional financial backing. The managing editor, Ira Stoll, who is one of the founding partners in the paper, and I have shared this news with our colleagues, and we would like our readers as well to be aware of the situation.

That was a portion the letter printed on the front page of the New York Sun, a newspaper in Manhattan that employed me for the last year of its publication. We shut down a month later after not a dime of money was invested into the company.

The letter from the New York Sun wasn’t intended to let the readers of the newspaper know what was happening. It was a plea for help to Rupert Murdoch, Sam Zell or anyone else who owned news media outlets. The New York Sun was for sale. I feel the same is going on with Podango. They have a lot of intellectual property and technology as a company, and it’s for sale while the company goes down in flames. They have a studio in San Francisco that was probably way too big and expensive for their needs, they purchased the GigaVox Audio Lite software from GigaVox and have a back end that is powering their servers. Does anyone want to buy a podcast hosting company?

And people scoffed at me when I said podcasting is dead at PodCamp Montreal.

Currently, you have one global set of options: Show me all @ replies, @ replies to the people I’m following and no @ replies. For those not on Twitter, an @ reply is a message you send to someone publicly. I’d like those control for each person individually. That way if I choose to follow someone like Brand Yourself I can tune out the replies and only get the actionable tips but also choose to hear that everything that Dan Patterson says to everyone because his conversations are worth listening to.

I think that Twitter could implement this without adding clutter to the interface, but then again, there’s something to be said about the simplicity of universal settings too.

I obviously appreciate any discussion around my content, but how do we solve the problem of not being able to post to both Twitter and make a blog comment. To some degree, Mashable has put a merger between the two by allowing you to post to Twitter that you have commented on a blog post, but it doesn’t allow you to continue the conversation in both places. It just sticks a flag in your Twitter stream stating that you’ve been to Mashable and have commented.

Is this a problem that BackType is supposed to solve? Maybe it’s a Data Portability or Open ID or Open Social issue? Gogle Friend Connect? Facebook Connect? I know that Twitter has not jumped on board with any of those initiatives.

Here’s what I’d like to see happen (are you listening Disqus? CoComment? Other comment companies/plugin makers?)

I’d like to see a WordPress plugin that gives an option to use Twitter credentials to post a comment on the blog comment that will cross post the first characters to their Twitter account in response (@robblatt) to me, also giving a tinyurl back to the blog post. Is that possible?

Have you seen more discussion on Twitter about your posts than in the comments of your blog lately?

This is a list of best practices, so be ready for list.

Think Google. People used to come to the front page every day, like getting their paper at their doorstep. Now people go to Google to find out the news. Type in the question you want answered and see what’s there.

Write about what you know and stick to your guns. Write what you know and know what you write.

Create an editorial calendar and stick with it. This has been echoed by lots of people at the Thin Air Summit. Write out a calendar of content in advance, so you’re ready to write and you have the information you need.

Headlines should clearly state what the article is about. When people are on the web, it needs to be completely clear what the article is about. Avoid one word headlines and cleverness. The best headline writers are clear and clever. Good headline starters: How to, 10 ways to, the best… Deliver on promises. Bait and switch is for crooks.

Post frequently and regularly, posting content at the same day at the same time. writing too long is writing LAZY. Put your best stuff and make your point in the first 200 words, no one makes it to the end. Explain jargon. Use all the tools that are available to you. Be useful to your reader. Punctuation matters. Go through your old articles and clean them up. Avoid passive voice, write with authority. Avoid personal tirades.

Article ideas: write frequently and short. Write evergreen. Check out what other publications are writing, and write about it but don’t forget to link back. Sign up to be on a press release distribution list.
Post timely info. Late info doesn’t help. Posting a little something is better than nothing at all. Don’t take on too much with a post. Ask a question in your headline, answer it in the post. Use templates that work and stick with it. Stop using multiple fonts and colors. you don’t have to be profound with each post. Avoid obscure references, know your audience. Write a good lead.

Create good subsections that people will be able to find your content easily. Be useful.

Partner up! If not with other publicatons, then other bloggers.

Chris is a writer for Rocketboom.

He read Culture Jam – How to Reverse America’s Suicidal Consumer Binge–And Why We Must. In the book, the author advocates turning off the TV altogether. Chris couldn’t do that, but instead turned his TV into his computer monitor. His living room is his office. He immersed himself in the pertinent medium (internet) in order to write for it.

RB presents the news in a new way. Each episode is meant to able to be a viral video, something made to be shared. There are two to six people working locally and remotely on the script working up to 12 hours on each script. How do the writers collaborate?

Google Chat – video is not necessary when you are writing. It’s the basic means of communication.
RSS Readers – looking for the most interesting stuff that’s not already viral (for video RSS, Chris suggests Miro)
Social Networks – Digg, Delicious, Friendfeed. Here’s the friendfeed room: http://friendfeed.com/rooms/rboom it’s a means of sharing.
Google Docs – pastes story ideas while chatting in real time.

For writing a news magazine style show, your ext has to have compelling visuals. Every two to three seconds there is a new visual. They have 10-12 stories within three minutes. Example – Rocketboom on Anti-Gravity. Lots of visuals and heavy subject matter into a short show.

Another angle in educating your audience is to give valuable education that’s useful. Example: Rocketboom on Fallacies. The show attempted to help people realize why they pass judgments.

People love recognition, and in order to build loyalty you can appeal to the audience and show recognition. O RLY? Know Your Meme – ORLY?

Treat every video like it’s going to be seen by millions of people.

http://12seconds.tv/channel/robblatt/47199

Story telling is the key to your voice. It’s how you communicate to children, and it’s how communication has always been.

A breakthrough in media was the walkman. It changed how you consumed media. It made media personal. Through mixtapes we became personal publishers with audio. The original version of it was diaries. Even further back was the printing press.

Graffiti is also an interesting form of story telling. Imagine having something you want to say so bad you’re willing to go to jail or worse for it. It’s a metaphor to some degree for blogs. It’s a need to have their voice heard.

How do we best get our voices heard?

Speak in a forum where people will hear you. Occasionally (as in graffiti) you put your voice in a place that is illegal to do so. Bloggers DO get arrested, as do people who paint graffiti and pirate radio stations.

This is a redefinition of the status quo in the media. We have made media easier to create. With more voices making noise, the less control the media has. Everyone is a channel, and our channels run parallel with traditional media channels. Some of our channels represent or are traditional media channels.

Mobile devices are the future because they are your connection to these channels everywhere.

What are we doing? Citizen media. It’s both amazing, but also maddening. For all the awesome stuff out there, we’re also drowning in spam.

Leading the discussion is Dave Troy.

Interesting way to pull data together. SMS, phone messages and Twitter are all coming into one main application that is mapping reports live. There are lots of people that are going to be using the data at http://votereport.pbwiki.com/partners.

Will people really be using this? The idea is to make an immediate response capability possible. SMS is proprietary and phone messages are done with asterisk.

If Twitter fails, everything else will still work. They’re not sure how it’ll work, but it’s an interesting experiment.

Vote Report supports “L:location” to really locate yourself without GPS.

Has anyone approached them about being embedded at a polling station? Yes, they are calling those people “super tweeters”.

Conversation should be taken off the project, because it’s meant to be a data feed. The hardest part of all of it is normalizing the data.

Can this be easily turned on another topic? Should be able to, there was lots of work that went into it.

In terms of crowd sourcing, what’s the most effective means of reaching folks? It’s spread out, but specific communities that are geared towards specific functions.

Leading the discussion is Adam Boalt of Boalt Interactive Business. On Twitter @boalt.

Boalt works with Fortune 500 companies to generate leads and monetize on the web. Think about how social media will affect an industry before talking to companies. Think about the numbers. Currently 86 million internet users visit SM daily, by 2011 1/2 of all internet users will visit SM sites daily.

Target: Who’s your target? Define your audience. Monitor what already exists in your space. Who’s talking bout you and your competitors?

Presence: Learn what people are saying about you. Launch content and services on different SM sites.

Communicate: Listen and engage. Develop a conversational tone.

Examples…

Hospitality.

Targets existing customers, travel bloggers, tour operators and local residents. Sets up and establishes with a blog, Twitter account, Upcoming, Ning, Facebook, Flickr and/or YouTube. Establishes presence next. Search first for people who mention brand and tertiary keywords. Flickr accounts can be important. You’re providing consumers and customers with resources they can use so they can help share across other social media platforms. Communicate by posting events, broadcasting any packages and making deals but respecting the privacy of everyone involved. Don’t publicly invade someone’s privacy.

Real Estate.

Targets existing customers, new prospects and the local community. You want to connect with people, so let people know about your sites right away. You can also do research on your customers through scial media. House values, average salary for salaries for a profession in an area. Establishes presence with a blog, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr and/or Delicious. Upload property photos to flickr, bookmark local events and points of interest on Delicious. Communicate with ocal information, featured listings, tips on buying a home and financing options. Twitter stories about the housing market, etc.

Automotive Sales.

Targets existing customers, new and used car buyers, enthusiasts and the local community. Presence with blogs, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr and/or YouTube. Constantly touch without being invasive. The finesse is in communicating at the right time and hitting the right customers. Individual stories, digests, etc.

Analytics.

You can track your traffic with Poprl to other sites.

Demograhics.

MySpace users are on average over 35.
Maintaining Exposure.

Establish a routine. Develop a plan to push your content out. Get a real schedule. Take baby steps. Implement your brand across other sites. Get a real schedule of posts until it becomes second nature. Make sure you’re sending intelligent and relevant information. Manage and educate clients on the benefits of the media to make them beleive in it.

Accelerate your strategy. Advertise, sponsor events to broaden your reach.

The general question is “How can we make money with Social Media?” The leader of the talk is Sean Gallagher of of The Packet Rat.

An interesting thought. Any any point, there are a minimum of five billion information sources on the planet. How can you be a sustainable information source with so many out there? That’s only step one. Step two is staying in business.

Tip jars seem to be a popular topic here. Or tip jars that are disguised as something else. Disguised as a credits” or micropayment system. This is how Barack Obama raised so much darn money. This is also how public radio and TV stays in business. Of course, you need to have an established community that thinks that you are worth supporting for this.

A membership or subscription method seems to work to draw in more business. Also think about giving something away regularly and also release paid content along side it. This will draw people in who want the free things and supplement their free “purchase” with additional content. This works in the gaming industry.

How do you drive up enthusiasm outside of the base? The UGC model works inside the base, but you need more excitement to bring in people outside the base. You have to link in to the participatory community. Online networks seem to be a way to drive excitement about offline events, which in turn create publicity for the online sites/markets/products.

What’s going to get critical mass and get revenue? You have to think about your users when thinking about social networks. When people are at work, an IT department might be blocking usage. Who you partner with can make a difference based on your target audience. Figuring out an ROI upfront about choosing your network or sites is nearly impossible. An idea was to ask your customers “how do you want to be monetized?” Take those results with a grain of salt. Microsoft listened to what people requested with Vista. Look at the end result.

When you have a cover charge to get in, you’ll know your audience a bit more. Paying to get into forums or member benefits seems to work with a large enough audience. But I think that nearly anything will work with a rabid enough audience.

Does ANYONE make money using crowd sourcing? Mechanical Turk from Amazon maybe, but all the other companies that are relying on it seem to be dead or dying. That might be a lack of marketing capability by the companies. Before applying crowd sourcing, make sure that it’s solving a problem that you actually have. Use a tool to fix a problem.

Regardless of your site, a blended approach is the way to go. It works well for LinkedIn by forming partnerships, advertising, paying to enter, a pro model, etc. Of course, this is hinging on you having a community that’s willing to give money or time over in one form or another.

Other notes:

• Facebook really nailed the personalization of ads when Google missed the mark completely. Everyone’s seen inappropriate Google AdSense ads with content.
• The larger the registration information, the less involvement you’ll get. When you create a barrier, you’ll find that people can’t get around them. This includes the barrier to entry of TIME. The longer it takes to learn or adopt, the less adoption you’ll have.

Because anything longer is boring. The scientists here at the 12seconds dodecaplex have conducted countless hours of research to determine the precise amount of time it takes for boredom or apathy to set in during typical Internet video viewing. Our patent pending Electro-Tear-Duct Prongers have determined that exactly 12 seconds of video is the ideal amount of time to keep anything interesting.

While posting 12 second long videos is fun, they’ve also come up with a way to get people (like me) coming back to the site every day. It’s called the 12Second Challenge. The people at 12Seconds post a question that sits on the homepage, and responding to it is just on click away. They award one winner each day for what I assume is the best answer.

I won yesterday’s challenge!

12 challenge: What’s the one feature that 12seconds needs to launch next? on 12seconds.tv

Steve Gilmour is all sorts of crazy about Twitter’s IM features. He spent a third of the time he had with the guys from Twitter at Bear Hug Camp grilling them in every single way possible about bringing back Twitters instant message and track services. Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter said “One reason we came to this event is to see how the community can help.”

Apple cut their live streams, but that created a market for live information from their events. In turn, the invitations became more valuable, and those who were invited and could get information out quickly about those events made money from their websites. That information was previously useless because it was freely available. When Apple made that information more scarce, that information became more valuable. Also as a result, Apple has created an “Apple Keynotes” podcast channel and each time there is an Apple announcement, that channel skyrockets to #1 in the iTunes Store’s podcast rankings.

This is why I don’t understand why Gilmour is so crazy that Twitter be the one who implements IM and tracking services. By taking those services offline and providing an API into their application, Twitter has created an opportunity for a third party to become the provider of that service. Why Gilmour thinks that Twitter is the answer to this baffles me. It’s bad business for Twitter to be the company that provides this because when they create an aftermarket for Twitter services, they have another company doing PR for them. Case in point, all the sites that headline and scream about their live Apple coverage. Just today I saw Engadget, Gizmodo, Ars Technica, CNet, SlashGear, MacWorld and MacRumors all provide live reports of the keynote.

you can read Twitter’s official announcement regarding IM services on Twitter’s Status blog: IM Not Coming Soon and Gilmour’s overblown reaction Twitter to IM: Drop Dead.

I’ll note that even in the official status post, they state that IM is possible using the Twitter API.

Last week, Venture Beat posted The Sequoia “RIP: Good Times” presentation: Here it is. Slide 46 includes the following phrases under “SURVIVAL”

1. Established Revenue Model
2. Need for Profitability

These weren’t the only two points, but they’re the important ones.

This presentation was created to re-educate Sequoia invested companies about today’s market and economy. Are these two goals new to the playing internet playing field? I am pretty sure that people started to wake up after eBay bought Skype for $2.6 billion or when Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion and couldn’t figure out how to make money with them. PodTech took $7.5 million and turned it into a $500k sale. Earlier this year Revver sold itself for $5 million, about $7.7 million less than the total amount of funding it received.

The days of building a company to be acquired are over, and it was stupid to ever rely on that to begin with. Make money stupid. It’s how you stay in business.